


They Clip Your Wings

by Churbooseanon



Series: Starlight Challenges [11]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 09:31:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4095889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Churbooseanon/pseuds/Churbooseanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They take everything from you, Four Seven Niner. They take your wings and your friends and your freedom. They give you a desk and a ghost. And you survive. You always survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Clip Your Wings

**Author's Note:**

> For Starlight Challenge 4/13/2015: My job's like any other. You have your good days and your bad.

Since the first time you took to the sky, took to the limitless wonder of space, you’ve know what you were meant to be doing. That first time you knew you were a bird meant to soar free through air and vacuum alike, master of all and bound by none. When they do away with your name, well, what do you care? Names are titles, are chains that weigh down your wings. Numbers, impersonal and unfeeling are freeing, so you don’t insist on being called anything. Some use your designation, some simplify. You learn to respond to ‘hey you’ just as much as ‘Niner’ or ‘crazy bitch’ (but only South calls you that, so you don’t let it get to you). 

There is a freedom in motion. Even when you’re being chased and shot at, even when lives depend on you, even with every moment that may be your last one, there is a joy. A freedom. Knowing that everything depends on how good you are, and you’re just so fucking good. Your past doesn’t matter. Where you go after this war is finally won won’t matter. All that matters is your bird moving under you, acting as your wings as you dominate your realms. 

They come to clip your wings before your team even finishes scattering to the winds you rule so easily. Come to pull your pinion feathers as you pass a bottle around the table with the only survivors. Florida will leave soon, that’s the scuttlebutt, and so the blue clad lancer nurses the bottle slowly and doesn’t look at Wyoming. Wyoming you’re certain will fly the coop soon after his lover is taken from him, and honestly, Niner, you don’t know where that leaves you. But the three of you pass the bottle and consider all you’ve lost. 

They come to take the wind from your feathers before you can pour shots into the assembled glasses before you. One each for the twins, gone and free and together no doubt. One for Texas, who was the only one whose defiance of all of the laws of man and nature has brought the walls tumbling down around them. Another for the thief who stole his own freedom, freedom that few of them had realized had been stolen. A half-shot for the poor rookie grounded down in Recovery, his mind said to be fried and his body broken in the tumult around them all. No one dares suggest one poured for Connecticut, but Niner, you know another free bird when you see it. You are the hawk, a champion of the skies, but her? She was a Merlin, swift and rarely letting herself glide to catch a breath. No, that drink you’ll leave for her later, on your own time and own terms. Three will be for Carolina of course. One for the pride she took in all of you. Another for how futile her efforts were. The final for the cruelty of her ending. 

No one will pour one out for Maine. 

In fact, no one will pour any out, at least not that you’ll know. Perhaps Florida and Wyoming will when you’re gone, because they look uncomfortable as the armed guards enter the room and gesture for you. Commands, they say, from the Director. You’re to be brought to him. 

The way you figure it in the moment is that he’s going to send you with the two left to him to retrieve the others. Send the hawk to harry and hunt the others, returning them to the roost. 

Instead you’re left standing there through the pronunciations. Stand and wait as the rooster who thinks himself so great fluffs himself up. Crows his dominance and with each word he plucks the pinions from your wings. They lay before you in a little pile, each quill tipped with some small spot of blood. Nor does he even let you stay there long enough to sing your sorrow over their loss. Instead you get rushed off by the guards, his bullying crows, badgering you now that you’re in their realm. They take you to new quarters: your own among the flight crews no longer needed. 

In minutes you go from free and unbound to weighed down by more weight than your body can bear, the skies stripped from you. Powerful hawk to dodo bird in no time flat. 

You flop down onto your new nest, look around at the creature comforts of this new room that you never had in your old bunk. 

What a lovely gilded cage he gives you in place of the wind on your wings and the joy of life in your song. 

What a doom he levels upon you. 

* * * * * *

They give you a perch. Hours and hours over the next weeks you spend in a small, dark room at a desk. Displays before you, headphones over your ears, a microphone in your face. None of the comfort of your helmet. No familiarity of your cockpit. Nothing but a screen and a nameless, faceless person with a designation of RA-insert-number-here identity at your disposal. 

Orders flash across your screen and you relate them with mechanical precision. Information typed into the terminal, queries answered. 

No part does he give you in the hunt beyond this. Apparently he doesn’t trust you. 

In a way, Niner, you suppose you understand. 

How many days pass? How many nights? They bleed endlessly together as she sings her mourning songs. What good is a bird that cannot fly? A bird that will not sing? 

He gives you comforts in your cage. As an ‘invaluable’ part of the Recovery structure you get such privileges. Your favorite foods appear at your ‘office’ every day. Any alcohol you need always seems to arrive. Your bed is covered with fine sheets, and when you get in fights with other controllers, he looks the other way. A new pecking order made, through anger and the strength of your beak and talons. They are all they leave you, and Niner you fear the day when he blunts those too. 

At night you stay up late, sitting on your bed with your knees pulled up to your chest. What you know is that they’re all gone. What you know is that you’re trapped. What you do is drown yourself in the alcohol he leaves for you, large swallows at a time. 

You don’t cry. 

You won’t give him that pleasure. You’re down, you’re broken, but like hell he gets to see it.

* * * * * *

There’s a new operative on your slate when you come in one morning. It’s been so long. Still the time bleeds endlessly one day into another. But you’ve been fed up, your body fortified by the empty warmth of your morning drink, and you know there’s bourbon in the bottom drawer of your desk. You’ll make it through this day like you would any other. Like you have every other. Maybe he’s caged you, stolen everything, but he won’t kill you. 

“Come in Command. This is Recovery One. I’ve arrived at the coordinates and will begin my investigation of the scene immediately.”

His voice is a blessing and a knife slid into your gut. This, then is the reward? 

“Wash?” you ask, your voice strangely strained. Once you would have said the name with a sharp bite of amusement in your tone. You always liked your rookie, but now? Now it’s like the sounds can barely escape the chains that have been wrapped around you so long. Eternal weights dragging you to the ground, and here, the key, held tantalizingly out of reach. 

Silence dominates the room for a time until finally there’s a very tired voice responding. 

“Niner?”

It’s a name you haven’t answered to since they took your wings from you, and the sound of it on his voice, even as dead tired and yet professional as his voice is, makes you giggle. 

“You’re alive,” you laugh, a funny feeling in your gut, in your head. Hysteria, you think. Has to be because your whole body is shaking. It’s like you’re waking up, and the excitement spreads to your voice as you speak again. “Fucking hell, Wash, where have you been? What are you doing? Why are you Recovery now. Did you know they put me behind a d--”

“Command, proceeding with investigation with the incident area.”

His tone is the same you remember of another. Carolina’s commanding tone. This isn’t a time for conversation, it says. Isn’t a time for memories, but for orders. 

Okay, you can play that game too. It just takes patience. You know patience, don’t you? Isn’t that what all this time is teaching you?

* * * * * *

Truth be told, you’re not sure which sin is worse. The fact that they plucked you from the sky, or that they took all the joy and wonder from the team’s kitten. There is no curiosity. No joy. No play left in Washington. No, in Recovery One. 

What do you do then? 

The nest they give you abandoned as you sit day and night at the monitor. Listen for his voice. Pray for this last member of your brood to come back to you. Pray for his soul. 

Do you even believe in souls? 

“Niner?”

You jar awake with the headphones on your ears and your body slumped over your desk and you blink blearily at the monitor in front of you. A dream of course. Months and he’s never reached out to you. Earlier, seeing what remained of York, you had dared to hope for a moment. But no, not Recovery One. He’s killed Washington as surely dead as Command has killed Niner. Yet there is an old name, an old identity in his voice, a claim on you both. But you’re certain it’s not what you think. 

You reach for the bottom drawer and the bourbon. Holding back is over. The Director wins. The caged bird seeks it’s end. 

“Niner?” his voice comes again as you pry the lid from the bottle, and you’re left frozen, staring. After a moment you remember you voice. 

“Reading you, Recovery One. Go ahead.”

Silence for a while and then his voice again, softer, like a memory you are still half certain you made up. 

“Do… do you remember the time York put the green dye into North’s shampoo, but then got their bottles mixed up?”

There’s need in his voice, masked by his attempt to be amused. 

You smile softly at the monitor and set the bottle aside. Wipe away the threatening tears. Catch your breath before you open your mouth and hope your voice still knows how to sing. 

“He insisted on wearing his hair green for a month,” you confirm, and the pleased sigh you get from the other end seems genuine. 

In that moment you know neither of you are sleeping tonight. There’s too much to say. A brief moment to shout and struggle against your respective cages, and like hell you’re going to let it slip through your fingers. 

Maybe you can’t have your wings back, but you sure as hell aren’t letting them keep dealing you a thousand cuts of punishment you never earned. You ruffles your feathers up big, you strong hawk you. And yeah, maybe they marred your wings, maybe you can’t fly. But like hell you’re any less the majestically proud raptor. If this is all they leave you, well dammit you’re going to own it. Be queen of all you survey. It may not be much, but it’s yours. Just like him. It’s all you have left.

And maybe someday you’ll even get free and taste the wind in your feathers again. 

Stranger things have been known to happen.


End file.
